Reel Expression

I spent all day yesterday with a friend of mine at a cemetery in northern Chicago. Here are some of the pictures I took:

Hopefully next weekend I’ll be going on a photo shoot with a friend somewhere out in Chicago. For at least some of the shots, I was hoping to do a little playing around with high dynamic range imaging (HDRI). It’s a photography technique that increases the range between the lightest and darkest parts of an image by merging multiple exposures of the same shot.

Yesterday I was reading up on some tutorials and found you can cheat it by processing 1 image into the various under and over exposed steps and merge them together. So I dug up the RAW images of my trip to Rome a couple of years ago and had a bit of a play. It might not be true HDRI, but they certainly look interesting.

Update:
About the sources used to “cheat” HDRI. Its actually rather easy if you are using photomatix: copy the picture the amount of times you want (need about 3-5 total), drag them into the box for “generate HDR,” and the program will tell you they are the same exposure and ask if and how much you want to change the E.V. spacing. There are a few other ways to do it, but that’s what I did.

My entire process was pretty much taken in bits and pieces from these 3 tutorials:
http://www.vanilladays.com/hdr-guide/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cleever/145838011/in/set-72057594134300570/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cleever/255026221/

It’s interesting the kind of shot you can get with a mobile phone (palm pre), contorted, unable to move, 1 handed, and having a needle repeatedly jabbed into your leg. The photo is an untouched original.

Last weekend for my birthday my friend gave me a new tattoo. It’s not fully finished, but it’ll be kitten paws going from my heel spiraling up my shin to the side of my knee. That brings the count up to 9 and quite a few more to come. \o/

Don’t mind me.. just making certain the photoblog section is working properly.

I recently bought a bicycle and have been cycling down the trail along the lake any day that it isn’t too nasty outside. I always seem to stop and rest about the same spot. This is a pic taken with my mobile of it.